How did you discover that new web game or hilarious video? Between social bookmarking, social networking, socializing, the internet has made sharing information and ideas as simple as pointing and clicking. So do we need anointed trend setters anymore? Two conflicting theories are hashing out the marketing debate, but both forget to give credit to the real influencer - the internet. The internet has flattened the playing field for anybody to contribute to starting or spreading a trend.

Marketing conventional wisdom has followed the teachings of books like The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and The Influentials by Jon Berry and Ed Keller. These books claim a few well connected individuals inspire the vast majority in terms of the clothing we wear or movies we watch. These people are often called influentials. Marketing companies promote their connection with these influencers and often focus advertising budgets strictly to reaching this oligarchy of culture.

New research is challenging this conventional wisdom. Clive Thompson writes for Fast Company about Duncan Watts research on social trends.

[Duncan Watts] has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says. “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”

Watts theorizes trends are more random, or at least harder to track. All the research done on trends has looked at successful trends. Trends that failed to catch on are harder to study. Watts computer simulations give more credit broader social networks, meaning marketing to a larger group is more important than a select group. Simply, if more people know about your product or idea, the odds are more likely someone will share that information.

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It’s hard to believe Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has much to offer online gay daters, but there was his ad on Gay.com. The New York Times reports on the trouble politicians are having buying ads on the internet. Romney’s campaign used an ad placement system that puts his ads on various sites, including Gay.com and FanFiction.net, not the conservative, religious right Romney is courting. Republican candidate John McCain found his ads on the liberal Huffington Post and Democratic candidate Barack Obama angered Jewish groups appearing next to a book the group found anti-Semitic.

These candidates are starting to discover online advertising, shockingly, isn’t the same as television and print advertising. When you let some computer pick where your ads go, as these placement systems do, you’re hoping the math always equals what you expect. As anyone who’s used any kind of search engine, the math doesn’t always equal out.

The number of gaffes makes me wonder if politicians lack of understand is coupled with laziness. They’re buying into a network of ads instead of targeting their advertising exactly where they want it. I would doubt a politician would spend the thousands of dollars on television ads, risking that their ad would appear next to a children’s cartoon show and not CNN. But web advertising is still so cheap. With some services, like Google AdWords, you only pay when someone clicks your ad. And then you’re only paying in dollars and cents for each hit. So the ceiling to advertising on the web is much lower than television. As a result, the advertising being done is being less scrutinized. But it’s a little funny for the rest of us.

Myspace controls 80 percent of the social networking sites. Google has 50 percent of web searches. eBay, PayPal, Flickr, etc. The web, for all its range and unlimited information, enjoys anointing single sites as the rulers of that particular genre. For all the discussion of media consolidation and big business in the physical world, online seems to have an eerie effect. Even when options appear, web users prefer to join/stick with the leaders in each field.

The reason for this appears obvious. The most popular web sites thrive on user-generated content, from eBay’s auctions to Myspaces my-spaces. Why join Faceparty.com when all my friends are already on Myspace. With Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other sources of information, users want all their information in one place. But this presents a difficult business and advertising challenge.

First, how do companies expand and/or start-up in this monopoly based climate? New social networks and search engines keep popping up against the Myspace and Google juggernauts (even Microsoft is having trouble here). Does this mean every new business is going to have to be an original, home grown idea. And if so, how many standard sites can I fit into my daily schedule.

Second, how, if at all, can web monopolies hurt/help business and users? Already, Google is the lord of web advertising. High placement on popular search terms can guarantee a website’s success, with similar results for paid Google ads. But YouTube and Myspace have yet to find real business models, still in the experimental stages, so their place as a controlled market force, like Google, remains to be seen.

And lastly, how does this happen? For any web start up, the question can no longer be, how do I make a new search engine. It has to be about how do I make something completely new. Then ask, how do I get everybody to use it. How, if at all, can this viral marketing be manipulated. Myspace, YouTube, Flickr all work without any advertising and are monsters in their genres.

A few exceptions, to note. Job sites are quite plenty. Craig’s List appears a decisive leader in all things classified, but HotJobs and Monster compete on pretty fair ground (and HotJobs has the backing of Yahoo!). Yellow pages and dating sites also do not seem to suffer from monopolies. At first glance, there seems to be a link in the need for local or specialized information, but many of these sites offer very redundant information (with similar features as Google Maps compared to MapQuest, both with yellow pages, and even Myspace for dating sites).